[erpellan]

The driving cost for solar pv is the structure and the land, the panels are now so cheap (and getting cheaper) that the economic recommendation is to install 3x the generation capacity of the inverter. Sizing for hitting capacity on the darkest days basically.

Living in a draft proof, highly insulated home with mechanical air filtration and heat recovery, driving an EV that’s powered by the roof of your house doesn’t sound like any kind of worse life to me.

Abundant, locally generated electricity is a game changer. You can even extract drinking water from the air inside your house in all but the driest of locations.

[camillomiller]

Mmm ok, so everyone lives in a house in an American suburb with American population density levels? Yeah, it sounds like you really don’t get how most of the world’s population lives.

[tchaffee]

Cities have far more potential for efficient energy generation and use than houses.

Let's take one poor country: Brazil. 80% of electricity is from renewable resources.

You cannot buy pure gasoline at the pump, it's all mixed with renewable ethanol and the percentage goes up by law every year. Since the vast majority of cars run on pure ethanal which you can get at all fueling stations, some people choose to never buy fossil fuels for their car.

All diesel is mixed with renewable biodiesel by law, and that percentage goes up every year.

So if a poor country with the largest city in the Southern hemisphere can make such rapid progress, you're really out of excuses. The technology and prices are there. The question is electing the right people who will encourage it to happen.

Some will mention that Brazil is lucky to have a lot of hydro which is true. So go look at their huge investment in solar and wind which isn't luck. And then you need to explain the progress in transportation moving away from fossil fuels. There's a lot to learn from a poor developing country with huge cities.

[aziaziazi]

Those massive investments are made in the hope for return, not the current elected people’s green goodwill. Brazil has lots of land and water which makes ethanol (financially) profitable and many mines that are better driven for national solar panel production than going to international market.

[tchaffee]

> Those massive investments are made in the hope for return, not the current elected people’s green goodwill

Could you please share the evidence you have of the motivations of the elected people? Anyone can make guesses and it would be easy enough for me to come up with a list of reasons that your guesses are wrong. I'd prefer a more evidence based approach. Lacking evidence, guesses like this can be ignored.

I'm also not sure why the motivations are even important if the end result is renewable energy, and especially energy that is more carbon neutral than burning fossil fuels.

[_visgean]

> Let's take one poor country: Brazil. 80% of electricity is from renewable resources.

I dont think thats true at all: https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/brazil

[tchaffee]

Which chart are you looking at? I don't see a chart for electricity sources on that page. When I go to the page for electricity mix (https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix) and choose Brazil in the chart, I get a total of 77.46% of electricity coming from renewables (not including nuclear) for 2021. If we include nuclear, it's 80%.

It's usually higher than 80% without including nuclear, but 2021 had significantly lower hydro due to drought. Fortunately the huge investment in wind and solar kept that number close enough to 80%. Had that investment not happened, the numbers for 2021 would be much lower.

There were multiple decades in Brazil where 80% of electricity came from hydro alone.

[erpellan]

I was specifically addressing "You won't get people to agree to make their life worse for the sake of the environment, no matter how much activists keep trying to push that"

[distances]

That could as well be a city apartment, except for the rooftop solar being enough for the whole building.

[blitzar]

> so everyone lives in a house in an American suburb

How about we get started on those and see how we go? You can also put solar panels on the roofs of appartment blocks and the distributed cost and maintenance gets even mroe compelling even if you dont generate 100% of the usage.

[throwaway4aday]

> Living in a draft proof, highly insulated home with mechanical air filtration and heat recovery, driving an EV that’s powered by the roof of your house doesn’t sound like any kind of worse life to me.

The problem is that even if everyone did that it wouldn't come close to reaching net zero. Personal transportation, electricity use and heating are a fraction of the total emissions. Transportation, electricity and heating for commercial and industrial sectors are much larger and then you need to add on top of that direct emissions by industry and agriculture. So a lot of what people are arguing for when they say they want to cut emissions is a reduction in industry, agriculture and commerce which would indeed make life much worse for everyone.

[fullstackchris]

> You can even extract drinking water from the air inside your house in all but the driest of locations.

That's some Fremen-level tech right there!

[erpellan]

It's a dehumidifier welded to a water filter. Simple tech. Bonus if you're in a cold climate, it helps to heat your home up too.

I wish these guys, or someone would get beyond the 'call us for pricing' vaporware stage and actually start selling to retail customers: https://www.watergen.com/home-office/

[RaiausderDose]

These dehumidifiers produce half a liter a day and need around 72 watt

which is maybe 1€ per liter drinking water for my area

The tech is cool but not really new or a solution to all water problems, the energy cost is relatively high.

More about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGTRX6pZSns

[dontlaugh]

AC does it as a side-effect of cooling the interior, but it's still a miserly amount not worth capturing.

[erpellan]

Dehumidifiers come in a variety of capacities. Extraction of 4-8L per day with a 400W power consumption is typical, more if humidity is high. Larger communal units would be more efficient. If you have abundant power literally coming from the sky, why not use some of it to make clean water?

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=dehumidifiers+for+home

[RaiausderDose]

They are far from an abundant source of water, like you said.

Taking 400W *24/7 is quite a lot of energy, and I'm not really believing the 4-8L output.

At 17° Celsius and 38% humidity, you get 0.008g of water out of 1L of air. There are physical limits to this, of course.

The dude in the video does the calculations, and it's far from "no problem to make water out of air". It would be better to use the energy for something else.

If it was so easy to do, there would be no problems with water shortages around the globe (and soon maybe "water wars") just take it out of the air with solar.

[gambiting]

>>Taking 400W *24/7 is quite a lot of energy, and I'm not really believing the 4-8L output.

I run a dehumidifier in my British house(in the conservatory) and it easily fills up its 10L tank every 2 days. Also indicentally it does use 400Wh(which yes, is a lot of energy).